For perhaps the first time in the history of modern education, millions of primary and secondary students may begin the school year from home. While pupils in England are due to return to in-person learning this September, uncertainty remains as cases rise, local lockdowns are implemented, and the scientific community warns that the government’s test and trace system is not up to the job of containing potential spikes caused by the return of schools. Some parents may choose not to send their children back for their family’s safety.
School leaders and teachers will be rightly concerned about kids who have fallen behind. Parents and carers will be feeling anxious about the need, once again, to juggle work and home schooling.
The latter may also worry they are poorly equipped to support their children because they cannot remember topics such as long division. While there is little they can do as they wait for news of the months ahead, an experiment carried out by an 18th-century French schoolmaster, Jean-Joseph Jacotot, may soothe some of their anxieties about homeschooling and their lack of knowledge of the school curriculum.
Jacotot found himself assigned to teach in Belgium. The children in his charge spoke only Flemish and he only French. Undeterred, he gave his students a novel written in his mother tongue, Les Aventures de Télémaque, and a French dictionary, and encouraged them to take on the task of teaching themselves.
Remarkably, it worked. The students enjoyed solving the “puzzle” for themselves: “The intelligence that had allowed them to learn the French in Télémaque was the same they had used to learn their mother tongue: by observing and retaining, repeating and verifying, by relating what they were trying to know to what they already knew, by doing and reflecting about what they had done.”
Learning often has nothing to do with someone older or better read pouring the right information into the learner’s mind. (Consider how often children and even adults learn from trial and error, from learning to ride a bike to using a new technology.) Instead, learning has to do with awakening in the student the desire to grapple with interesting challenges. It has more to do with asking a child difficult questions at the dinner table, with encouraging one’s children to construct treehouses or fall down Wikipedia rabbit holes, and less to do with filling in the blanks of workbooks. Modern experiments in learning show very similar results, for example Sugata Mitra’s “hole in the wall” experiment. The educational researcher installed a computer into a hole in the wall in a New Delhi slum and found that, left to their own devices, children living in the area taught themselves to use it, becoming as adept as office secretaries in using the device.
Jacotot went on to teach other topics he knew nothing about, like painting and the piano, using his new style of teaching called “universal education”. It was founded on the idea that “all men have equal intelligence” and that “all human beings are equally capable of learning”. It was radical in its time, when only the sons of relatively privileged men received a formal education, and it is still radical now.
The challenges facing Jacotot were similar to those facing our education system today: unequal access to education and parents who know little about the topics their children are supposed to be learning. Jacotot’s work was in part meant to demonstrate that the latter problem was also an opportunity to rethink how underprivileged children might learn. Parents (who in Jacotot’s time were often illiterate) could teach not by knowing but by encouraging and asking questions. If education is reimagined as students combining freedom and the right resources to explore ideas for themselves, then a surprisingly wide array of people can “teach” – including carers during a pandemic.
We should worry less about the number of hours that children spend on Zoom and more about their access to resources, from books to technology, that they can use to explore the world around them from the safety of their own homes. At present poorer students appear to be falling behind during virtual learning, in large part because of a lack of access to the right devices and the internet. We can improve education this coming year by supporting carers, giving them flexible working plans and paid leave.
This does not, of course, mean that there is nothing to worry about when it comes to virtual learning. Studying from home still means missing out on a great deal of emotional and social learning that is crucial during childhood. Some students with special needs also do worse. A turn to home learning should not mean that teaching is simply left to carers altogether; teachers’ knowledge of the curriculum and expertise in the classroom is invaluable, and students need a greater variety of experiences, structure and resources, than parents alone can provide.
But as history and philosophy can demonstrate, learning does not only happen in a classroom and it does not always require an expert to supervise it. Jacotot’s discovery is that human beings are learning beings: they know hardly anything at birth but seek out and develop incredible capacities. It should make us less worried about children during this difficult time, and even more hopeful about ourselves.
• Sarah Stein Lubrano is a writer, education designer and doctoral student at Oxford University
